The fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is a recently identified serious consequence of alcoholism. These children exhibit a spectrum of abnormalities, however, in the most severely affected children we note prenatal and postnatal growth deficiencies, developmental delay, microcephaly, and short palpebral fissures. In addition to these consistent findings, other anomalies have been identified including maxillary hypoplasia, joint anomalies, hemangiomas and the underdevelopment of external genitalia. There are no abnormalities in the karyotype. The underlying common feature to this disorder is that the mothers of all these children are alcoholics, and they drank throughout the pregnancy. The overall object and long-term goal of this project is to develop a severely affected FAS and then to determine the consequences of alcohol abuse in the mother on the offspring. In order to reach this goal, we have prepared a non-human primate model of the fetal alcoholic syndrome in Macaca fascicularis which we expect will produce abnormal growth and development which will be similar to that in the human fetal alcoholic children. With the development of this model we will use a multidisciplinary approach employing morphological, neurochemical, neurophysiological, nutritional, neurological and behavioral techniques to determine the long and short term consequences of this syndrome. We believe this study will lead to an improvement in dealing with the effects of this process on the CNS.